Simmons conjures a dark future

Dan Simmons' Flashback starts out as a somewhat traditional detective story. In a dystopic near-future, former police detective Nick Bottom has lived down to his name. Finishing out a downward spiral that begin with the death of his wife five years earlier, Bottom is now unemployed, estranged from his teenage son, Val, and hooked on flashback, a drug that allows a user to relive...

World-class maker of worlds

In The Rise of Endymion, Dan Simmons brings the epic tale of his Hyperion universe to its powerful conclusion. Spanning four novels and many centuries of real and imagined galactic history, the Hyperion saga is an astonishing achievement, overbrimming with adventure, lyricism and insight. A miracle of invention and economy, played out on a dozen...

More things in heaven and earth

The distant future finds humanity scattered over hundreds of worlds, enslaved to an alien race, laboring in mines and building fortresses for their spider-like masters, the Archon. Earth has been transformed into a mass grave, and all that remains of human culture is the daily fare of pubs and churches. And also, as luck would have it, the plays of William Shakespeare.Wilbr, the narrator of the...

Sci-fi Column by Gavin Grant

Dan Simmons is not one to turn from a challenge and in Ilium, he takes on the task of rewriting the Iliad not retelling it, rewriting it. In science fiction, Simmons is best known for his massive Hyperion series, which won the Hugo Award and cemented his reputation as a storyteller of stylistic, well-written novels. Ilium will no doubt please those readers who appreciate a complex, epic tale,...